


Incunabule #284: a pamphlet on mobile telephones

by Jack Ironsides (JackIronsides)



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Based on a Tumblr Post, Gen, Originally Posted on Tumblr, bringing your platonic husband into the late 20th century through gifts, i propose that the good omens fandom start labelling short fic as incunables, just a little book nerd joke, the 6000th anniversary gift is technology, tv-verse timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 12:10:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20309281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackIronsides/pseuds/Jack%20Ironsides
Summary: Crowley is fed up with Aziraphale not having a proper phone, so he buys him one. It ... almost works out like planned.





	Incunabule #284: a pamphlet on mobile telephones

**Author's Note:**

> Based on [this exchange](https://ruffboijuliaburnsides.tumblr.com/post/187089503117/squeeful-im-fairly-whitty-sinnahsaint) about Aziraphale and phones between Neil Gaiman and jumpingjacktrash. [Originally posted to tumblr here.](https://jackironsides.tumblr.com/post/187102278137/ruffboijuliaburnsides-squeeful)

Crowley is fed up with Aziraphale not having a proper phone, so he buys him one. Crowley adores his own phone. It’s sleek and black, and looks as though if it were a car it would break landspeed records. The one he buys Aziraphale is in a glossy white, with fine rose gold edging around the bevel of the screen. The back of the phone has a slight rounded curve to it that makes it seem a little more friendly than Crowley’s rectangle of glossy dark light. It seems appropriate somehow.

He sets the phone up before taking it around to Aziraphale, and installs a few apps. He puts on an e-book app, and the WolframAlpha app[1], and OpenTable[2]. On a whim, he installs Candy Crush as a in-joke between him and the angel based on a remark Aziraphale made over wine last week.

Aziraphale takes it from him politely, saying he needn’t have bothered in that way which means he really wishes Crowley hadn’t. And changes the topic.

When he has it at home, carefully unearthed from its box and laid out on his desk like a medical specimen or particularly interesting new incunabulum, Aziraphale puts his glasses on and turns the small machine on. Aziraphale, the only angel to ever use a computer, takes to modern phones like a duck to water. It’s incredibly convenient! There are apps on there filled with books! Certainly, they’re not _quite_ the same as a _real_ book, lacking its tactility and very slight smell. But there’s a certain comfort to be had in waiting for Crowley at the duck pond, and knowing that if he’s late (as he occasionally is if he stops off for a quick Temptation on the way), Aziraphale can pick up whatever book he was reading back at the shop[3].

And he loves Candy Crush. Loves the colours and the cute pictures. Occasionally he’ll weaponise playing it against a bookshop customer’s insistent questions until they get fed up and go away.

And there’s something so soothing about lining coloured blobs up into sets. Reminds him of the creation of the universe. Crowley had designed galaxies, but Aziraphale was mostly on the watchmaker team. He coaxed protons and neutrons into nuclei, and taught electrons to pirouette like a corps de ballet around each one. Fine, fiddly work; but without it, there would be no starstuff for the galaxies to be built from.

So, perhaps a week later, when they’re on their second glass of wine in Aziraphale’s back room, pleasantly mellowing after a particularly fine evening at the Ritz, Crowley brings it up.

“So? How’s the phone going? Got the hang of it?”

Aziraphale smiles. Crowley always talks like he’s the only one who’s competent at technology. He may have an excellent stereo, and a portable telephone, and a car, but Aziraphale remembers who had to do his part in The Arrangement to coax some computers into ensuring that the M25 moved a quarter-mile to the west on the north-east quadrant.

“It’s perfectly fine. Far easier than I expected, really. It was kind of you to think of me.”

“Kind _nothing_; don’t spoil the moment,” snaps Crowley, but he’s pleased, and doesn't quite smother his smile.

This means he can finally get hold of his angel should he need to. And yes, Aziraphale is usually at his bookshop, but what if he isn’t? What if something goes wrong and Crowley _never knows_ because Aziraphale wasn’t near a phone? It isn’t something he thinks about much, of course it isn’t! He’s a demon. He doesn’t worry about things like that! He _doesn’t_. But every so often he thinks of it, especially when he smells smoke. So making sure he can get hold of Aziraphale more easily would just be more convenient for him, Crowley. And Crowley is a big believer in making things convenient for himself.

The next day, Crowley starts texting him. Aziraphale doesn’t notice at first, because his phone is forever and permanently set on silent, but in the afternoon he has a particularly stubborn book collector wanting to talk to him, and possibly wanting to _buy_ things from him.

The collector’s late middle aged with OAP hovering on the horizon, and is _very_ home counties, and has never been told ‘no’ in his life. He’s exactly the sort of man who despises modern life and ‘millennials’ (by which he means ‘The Youth’ and not ‘people old enough to be middle managers by now’), which means he’s _exactly_ the sort of man who gets mortally offended if Aziraphale plays Candy Crush at him, so he gets out the phone Crowley bought him and turns the volume of the game up[4].

He’s midway through a level when the phone bings annoyingly. It’s still less annoying than that horrible man asking something about the level of foxing on one of the books, and demanding something about humidity-controlled environments, so Aziraphale taps the little pop-up at the top of the screen.

The phone’s screen does a complicated shuffle animation, seeming to move the game away and behind the new screen, which turns out to be the messaging app. He hadn’t even bothered opening it during his explorations.

It’s a message from Crowley. There are several, as it turns out; sent at intervals during the day. This latest one is a slightly blurred photo of a pigeon on a London street. It’s the colour of milky tea, but its head is white, and there are little speckles of white amidst that warm brown.

Beneath it is a message from Crowley that reads _is this you_

Aziraphale can’t stop himself from smiling. The portending customer has finally left in a snit and a cheerful jingle of the door bell, so he’s free to flip the door sign to closed and head into the back of the shop to where the older of his two phones is. It’s the one he prefers to use, since its age makes it feel more comfortable – like a worn pair of slippers. In any case, he’s not in the mood for any more surprise customers today, thank you, so he’d rather not use the one in the shop and give potential customers _ideas_.

“Crowley, my dear!” he says when Crowley picks up. “I got your picture message. That was rather good. Did you take the photograph yourself?”

“Yeah, on the phone camera,” Crowley replies absently, and then: “Aziraphale. Are you calling from the shop phone?”

“Of course.”

“But I bought you a mobile. Which clearly you’ve been using, or you wouldn’t have seen the text.”

“Ye–es,” says Aziraphale, who’s not quite sure what this has to do with anything. “And I have two phones in the shop. Which is where I am.”

“It’s on a plan, you know. You don’t have to save your minutes.” It isn’t, as a matter of fact, since Crowley had told the phone to connect to the mobile network Or Else when he was setting it up, but he thought the angel might want the reassurance.

“I wasn’t worried,” says Aziraphale, who has no idea what minutes have to do with the conversation either. “But I do already have two phones. Which work perfectly well.”

“But you said you’d been using it. What have you been using it _for_?”

“Mostly for reading,” says Aziraphale, which Crowley ought to have expected. He installed a book app on there himself, and made sure it was on the home screen. “It is lovely to be able to take whichever book I’m reading to the cafe and not worry about whether the table has been adequately cleaned after the previous occupant’s cream tea. And the newspaper, of course[5]. Much more convenient than taking a broadsheet on the bus or Tube.”

“Of course,” sighs Crowley, realising that convincing Aziraphale to use the mobile properly will be a bigger job than he realised. At least the angel has it with him. Small victories. “Fancy dinner tonight, then?”

“Ooh, yes,” says Aziraphale. “I was looking through that restaurant app and found this place we’ve not tried, just on the other side of Regent St…”

—

  1. Crowley loves using it to find out how much wine France produced in 1986, or how far it is from here to Alpha Centauri, or just how enormous blue whales are. Sometimes he uses it to win arguments. [ ▲ ]
  2. Not that they ever need to reserve a table, but he knows Aziraphale will enjoy browsing through all the restaurants on it. Aziraphale loves finding new places for them to eat, even if he also loves returning to the Ritz. [ ▲ ]
  3. The apps always know what page Aziraphale has been on, even though the book he’d been reading was a crackling-dry book of twelfth-century prophecy bound on leather, and not a digital book at all. The fact that no e-book has ever been produced of these prophecies is rather beside the point. [ ▲ ]
  4. Aziraphale has had it for a week and he still thinks of it as ‘Crowley’s phone’. The thought of his … _colleague_ (friend) getting this for him still makes him smile. [ ▲ ]
  5. _The Guardian_ app was at the top suggestions in the app store once Aziraphale started playing around with the phone a bit on the second day he had it. There had not, of course, been an app for the _Celestial Observer_ in the store until Aziraphale went looking for it. But since he expected it, there it was. It looks a little like _The Guardian_ app in its layout, although there are no pleas to support independent journalism. It does, however, have an irritating tendency to freeze when Crowley approaches the bench Aziraphale waits on, or when someone sitting next to him on the Tube gets out a Jeffrey Archer novel. [ ▲ ]

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to Vigs's [The Nice and Accurate Guide to Footnotes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20192773), because it meant I didn't have to handroll my own (even if I do technically know how). And even if I made up my own style that technically isn't what's suggested.


End file.
